The Paddington 2 screenwriter Simon Farnaby is a busy man. Fresh from writing an updated prequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for Timothée Chalamet to star in, he has turned his attention to cleaning up Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree series for modern audiences, with greater success. Wonka felt like a bit of crisis management for the Roald Dahl brand, filing away all Dahl’s orneriness and dark wit for the sake of a well-behaved Wonka you could introduce to your gran — which is to say, no Wonka at all.
The outdated gender roles of Blyton’s tale are a much easier fix. Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy make for an appealing pair of young parents: she’s the high-earning designer, while he looks after the kids (Delilah Bennett-Cardy, Billie Gadsdon and Phoenix Laroche), trying to prise them away from their devices at dinner. But when Foy quits her job, it’s time to dust off one of the couple’s earlier dreams and head for the countryside, where Dad can grow his own tomatoes, a hipster dream of artisanal self-sufficiency that horrifies the kids. They roll up at a cobwebbed, ramshackle barn with no wifi and a tractor where the kitchen top should be. “I’ve only got 3G!” the kids wail. “Have we gone back in time?”
Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy star as the young parents who move their family to the countryside
As his work on the Paddington films showed, Farnaby excels at charming portrayals of modern family life with just enough fractiousness and idiosyncrasy to make them believable. It’s almost a shame when their youngest, Fran, is led by a fairy named Silky (Nicola Coughlan) to a magical tree in an enchanted forest. In its upper branches they find a big-headed Regency dandy named Moonface (Nonso Anozie), an angry pixie (Hiran Abeysekera), Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns), Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning) and a ladder leading to a series of different worlds. There’s the Land of Goodies and the Land of Birthdays, a kind of roller-disco seemingly staffed by Eurovision presenters, where everyone gets one wish.
The all-you-can-eat buffet arrangement is the giveaway here. With the series first published in the 1930s, Blyton was writing before CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, but her magical worlds have none of the cohesion and moral danger of Lewis’s. We are in the same gauzy candy-coloured dreamland of 101 children’s entertainments, with a few tacked-on warnings about not being too greedy and a late-arriving villainess played by Rebecca Ferguson. The film is more plugged into the dreams of the parents than the kids; every time we return to Garfield, Foy and their dream of a tomato farm, the story revives.
Farnaby has much more fluency round the choppy emotions of family life, you realise, than he does for straight magic — the magical elements in Paddington 2 were, after all, minimal — but if it’s a fully realised vision of Arcadia you’re after, Greta Gerwig’s Narnia, coming in November, would seem like the one you must pin your hopes on.
★★★☆☆
U, 110min
Dakota Johnson in Splitsville — “don’t see this film if you’re in love, or want to be”
Dakota Johnson lends her slow-burn sophistication to the sex comedy Splitsville. That’s not “sex comedy” as in something for teenagers loaded with jokes fit for the locker room. Nor is it “sex comedy” as in something frilly and British with naked husbands peeking from behind lace curtains to see if the coast is clear. Instead, with a nod to the director Judd Apatow, it’s a sharp, adult themes-filled throwback to the films of the Seventies, like Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, where a group of educated, liberated sophisticates say, “We’re fine with this,” and then end up in a Gordian knot of jealousy, insecurity and confusion by the film’s end.
That’s pretty much the plot of Splitsville, which is not really about sex at all but about people being confused about what their emotions are. It helps that the characters are hipsters and life coaches who feel as if they should know better.
After a brutal break-up, Carey (Kyle Marvin, who co-wrote the film with its director, Michael Angelo Covino) winds up weeping on the expensive couch of his best friend, Paul (Covino), and his wife, Julie (Johnson), who have “solved” the problem of adultery by taking the guilt out of it: they have an open marriage.
“What if it’s someone you know?” asks Carey, who promptly puts the theory to the test by taking solace in Julie’s bed one night when Paul is off in the city. Paul responds with an assault worthy of John Wick, smashing vases, furniture and fish tanks. It ends with both men on a mercy run to save the fish. He’s not as OK with it as he thought.
Therein lies the rub of Marvin and Covino’s busy, freewheeling comedy, which seems to have run its course by about the 30-minute mark but keeps finding new romantic triangulations to run past us. “This is exhausting,” Carey’s ex-wife, Ashley (Adria Arjona), says, and the film is, a little, too.
Marvin and Covino like a busy screen with lickety-split dialogue that allows punchlines to come out of nowhere — many of the jokes land like gut punches — but there’s no one you hope will get together in the final reel.
Johnson, as usual, seems to be playing with rom-com formula the way a cat plays with mice, as she did in The Materialists last year. So don’t see this film if you’re in love, or want to be. See it in the aftermath of a break-up, or want a cackle at the improbability of commitment.
★★★☆☆
15, 104min
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